Skullgirls 2nd Encore News

[h2]The GGPOtest updates are now in THE REAL GAME![/h2]
PS4/Switch players, please continue to wait patiently, it is not yet your time. Thank you. :^)

Please enjoy the followingseses:

• Much improved netplay!
  Play people from farther away, with better quality connections than mid-range players used to have. Green/yellow/red ping time thresholds and the Recommended Delay for Ping values have been adjusted to reflect the improvement.
  
• Fixed sounds playing/duplicating/not cutting off properly during rollbacks! THIS IS SO EXCITING!
  
• Lobbies and Quick Match now show continuously updated ping values, as well as displaying the jitter, or fluctuation in ping values over the last fifteen seconds. They also make an attempt to determine if your opponent is playing on wireless, but that is definitely less useful than just looking at the jitter. Really, just look at the jitter for a while. It's the only thing that matters. The 'wifi' part is for information only. There is no parking in the red zone.
• If you yourself are playing on easily-detected wireless, there will be a teeny little red dot in the upper-left corner during all online modes. If you don't like it, you can use the Launch Option
  

  -disablewifidot

• Reduced the online character select timer to 50, stage select timer to 20, and end-of-match timer to 50, to speed things up a bit.
  
• Fixed an old exploit to grief online opponents by softlocking the character select screen. NYAAAAH! :^P
• With the window unfocused, by default the game now keeps playing. If you want it to stop like it used to (except during online play), you can use the Launch Option

  -oldunfocusbehavior

• Fixed negative-damage bug in Training Mode information display.
  
• Added new feature: slightly crashier lobbies. :^P We'll get to it, I promise.
• Replays (saved via the Launch Option -enablereplays) will now automatically embed useful netplay-debugging data. If you have a problematic netplay match, you can just send me replays! You can also press Start and it'll get recorded to the replay file to help me fine problem spots. This way I can tell you "it's your internet, there's nothing I can do" with complete confidence. :^)
• You can use the Launch Option

  -ggposhowinfo

  to show onscreen GGPO debugging info during online play. If you see white text, it means "they haven't sent you the input you needed over 40 frames", which is now the most common problem. Blame the internet. :^)
  
• The GGPOtest branch has been RETIRED. It ought to automatically set you back to the regular game.
  

This was gonna happen today anyway, it has nothing to do with Skullgirls' inclusion in Evo Online. Oh, right, Skullgirls is in Evo Online! Well I already wrote this whole dang thing so I'm not changing it now...

Title screen build ID 16606.

In addition to the moderately useful wireless indication, [h3]Skullgirls now displays the most important information about your connection:[/h3] [h2]The "jitter" (variance in ping time) between you and other players.[/h2]


Usually more important than ping time, the jitter in packet transmission times is what causes large rollbacks and other undesirable effects.

This information is also displayed in Quick Match, and the game will color connections with bad jitter yellow or red the same way it colors connections with high ping.

The ping time and jitter info is updated at half-second intervals and is always displayed. The top line of lobby boxes now switches between location and lobby-relevant info like win count.

UPDATED 5/12, 1AM:
- Fixed wrong display of 2000+ jitter after playing a lobby game. :^P
- Fixed display of "" in lobbies when returning to the lobby after a game.

Uh, but...I had to rewrite a lot of things to get this to work, so if you notice anything weird like desyncs, please tell me. :^)

Title screen build ID 16581.

Hello! I was on a podcast today talking about online tournaments, and one of the questions reminded me that there was a feature Skullgirls didn't have that'd be really helpful for said online tournaments. So now it's got it in the GGPO test branch!

Skullgirls community: "Is it lobbies that don't randomly crash?"

Ha ha ha, very funny. No it is not, you wonderfully supportive people. The lobby code is scary and depressing. Instead, it is....

[h2]A "wireless internet" indicator for your opponents![/h2]

Yep, that's right, if you're playing on wireless/wifi*, in both Lobbies and Quick Match everyone else will now see a big ol' [h2](WF)[/h2] in front of your ping number. In addition, if the game thinks you're playing on wireless, it will draw a teeny tiny little red dot in the upper-left of your screen. If this dot annoys you, you can get rid of it with the launch option

-disablewifidot

but that won't prevent everyone else from knowing you're on wireless. :^)

In addition to this, there is one more nice timing fix which will help the game recover in case there's a big frame drop, as well as some extra logging info, courtesy Mr. Peck, if people are still sending in problem replays!

* How does it work?
Unfortunately there's no real way of knowing which network interface Steam is going to use for networking, even while it's using it, and especially if it decides to use a relay server or Steam P2P packets. And it's difficult to detect what's going on with networking in Windows generally, even on a good day. So what Skullgirls does is check for any connected wireless network on your computer, and if there is one it will report you as using wireless. That means if you're on a laptop and you have an ethernet cord plugged in and a wireless network connected, it will report you as wireless! In that scenario it is still, sadly, very possible for Windows to choose to use the wireless connection sometimes even though it's significantly worse, so that's the safest approach for the game to take. Turn that stuff off if ya can!

Special thanks to ﾠﾠﾠ for the testing help!

Title screen build ID 16557

Down to the end of the netcode fixes!
And fixes for things I broke during this process. :^)

[h2]Provided it runs with no new problems, this will become the Real Game this weekend on Steam![/h2]

• Training mode Max Combo Damage and Last Combo Drama numbers are no longer wrongly reset when you load a savestate. Whoops. Thank you to the person that pointed that out!
  
• By long-ago request, added the Launch Option

  -disablerainbowdouble

  which disables the hue shifting on Double #19 for everyone who is really boring out there.
  
• Re-added a very important -ggposhowinfo line of logging that I accidentally deleted in the last build. :^P
  
• Added one more framerate fix from an unlikely source! In the event that a frame takes a really really long time to finish, the game won't skip frames trying to "catch up" to where it should be, it'll just pretend everything is fine. This improves performance by not having a bunch of skipped frames after a big slowdown event like an OS hiccup.
  

Title screen build ID 16539

Sick of these yet? Almost done, I promise. :^)

In response to useful replays sent to me today, I made two small adjustments designed to help recovering from your game being either starved for opponent inputs, or behind by more than 14 frames, work better. Hopefully they don't make the rest of it work worse!

As usual, any problems, send me replays with -ggposhowinfo !

Title screen build ID 16512